Harriet Walter, Timothy Spall & More Join 'Wolf Hall: 'The Mirror and the Light'
Masterpiece and the BBC have announced the star-studded ensemble set to take part in their upcoming sequel series Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Based on the final installment in Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel's critically acclaimed trilogy of novels, the six-part prestige drama will see the bulk of the original series' cast reunite to bring the story of the infamous Thomas Cromwell to a close.
A man who rose from working-class beginnings as a blacksmith's son to become one of the most powerful figures in the court of King Henry VIII, Cromwell was – among many other things - one of the primary architects of the Protestant Reformation in England, and largely responsible for both the dissolution of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the fall of Anne Boleyn several years later. Original series Wolf Hall adapted the first two novels in Mantel's trilogy --- Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies --- which ended with Anne Boleyn's execution. The second will adapt will pick up right where the first series left off and cover the events of the last four years of Cromwell's life, until his own beheading in July of 1540.
As one might expect from a series with this kind of pedigree, the new cast members joining The Mirror and the Light are an impressive bunch. Harriet Walter (Succession) is set to play Lady Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the last surviving Plantagenet princess who watched her brother be executed so Henry could marry his first wife and her son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, named a traitor and run out of the country for refusing to support the king's divorce. Timothy Spall (The Sixth Commandment) has been cast as the ambitious Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, who was more than willing to let his own niece go to the block in the name of keeping hold of his own power.
